Ahead of the release of Football Manager 2015, Josh Warwick meets the
man in charge of the ultimate soccer simulation - and explains why the pros
take it so seriously

“My favourite young player at the moment is a guy at Bayern whose name I can’t pronounce,” reveals Miles Jacobson, ‘gaffer’ at Sports Interactive, the company behind the Football Manager computer simulation.

He is, in case you’re wondering, referring to Danish teenager Pierre Emile Højbjerg, whose signature, if you buy FM 2015, should be a priority.

I’ve asked Jacobson to name the likely contenders for the 2020 Ballon d’Or, based on the extensive database which has transformed FM into a professional scouting resource while at the same time cementing its status as the ultimate management game.

Football Manager supremo Miles Jacobson

“Everyone is talking about (Raheem) Sterling and rightly so. Many would say he has already made it but I think there’s a lot more to come.

“Last year we had the boyband hat-trick, when Louis (Tomlinson) from One Direction, Josh (Cuthbert) from Union J and two of The Wanted tweeted about the game,” says Jacobson.

“Most brands would absolutely kill for that. It didn’t sell us a single extra game. The tweet went out to 30 or 40 million people but it’s not our target audience.”

That target audience (and I count myself among the demographic) has traditionally been males aged 16 to 55 (and over), with a vivid/childish imagination and an ability to divorce themselves from reality for hours on end, as they propel Vauxhall Motors through the divisions, or secure European football for Fleetwood Town.

Procrastination is the thief of time, wrote Charles Dickens, who had clearly never heard of Football Manager, a game which has a physics-defying ability to make clock hands spin faster. FM 2014, Jacobson tells me proudly, has been played for a combined 23,000 years since its release last November.

The latest installment is released on Friday, and will include a host of new features, including (no joke) the addition of Movember, which will see some players growing moustaches during November each season. But more on that in a moment.

The game’s enduring appeal was celebrated recently with the release of an excellent documentary film - An Alternative Reality - which told FM’s story through the anecdotes of its legion of dedicated players.

The best story in the film comes from Jon McLeish, son of former Birmingham and Aston Villa manager Alex, who tells how, several years ago, he recommended to his father, then managing Glasgow Rangers, a young player he had unearthed on Football Manager.

McLeish senior subsequently made enquiries as to whether the then teenager - a little-known Argentine by the name of Lionel Messi - would be available on loan. The answer was, hardly surprisingly, no.

But Rangers were offered another youngster - midfielder Andres Iniesta - who was all set for a move to Scotland until the deal collapsed after he was called up to Barcelona’s first team.

The film also reveals that former AC Milan and Italy midfielder Demetrio Albertini is an FM obsessive who used the game’s data to help then national boss Giovanni Trapattoni identify key opposition players, most notably when the Azzurri faced an England team made up of several relatively unknown debutants during Peter Taylor’s breif reign as Three Lions manager.

“The film was effectively a drunken idea,” says Jacobson, who, clothed in trainers, t-shirt and jeans, is more terrace chic than boardroom power dresser.

“I watched the Swedish House Mafia documentary and was like ‘we could do that’. I wrote Football Manager the movie on a post it note, came in the next day and Ciaran [Brennan, PR Director at Sports Interactive] was like, ‘that’s a great idea’. Everyone else looked at me like I was on some hallucinogenic drug, particularly because we wanted to try to turn it round in five months.”

The result is a glorious reflection on a game which has brought joy and pain in equal measure to millions of players.

“We went above Frozen for about 20 minutes on iTunes, which was good. It seems like we have a hit film from something that had a budget of around 0.1pc of the other films in top 20, just because it’s people telling their stories about how the game has affected their lives.

“We’re really pleased with how it turned out. And since my mum has seen the film she has stopped asking me when I’m going to get a proper job.”

What sets Football Manager apart from other computer simulations is the accuracy of its player data - so accurate in fact that in August Sports Interactive struck a deal with Prozone, allowing Premier League clubs access to the game’s enormous database. That database is the product of extensive player monitoring reports produced by an army of scouts around the world.

“The agents know how many people use our database inside the game, via our deal with Prozone," says Jacobson. "There was a particular agent who was trying to persuade me, in inverted commas, to make sure that one of his players was a wonderkid inside the game and I went back to him and said ‘look, our researcher has watched him eight times and he’s not’.

“Two or three times a week I will get a player or an agent complaining about their player’s stats.”

While the Prozone deal is a formal endorsement of the accuracy of FM’s data, it has long been thought that professional clubs have used the game as a resource.

“There are loads of examples of real-life transfers that haven’t officially been done using our data, some of them good deals, some of them not so good deals.

“The interesting thing for me is when players are signed that people shouldn’t have heard of before. I remember when Hatem Ben Arfa signed for Newcastle and he played his first game and had a storming debut. Alan Shearer was on Match of the Day going ‘who is this kid?’ and Twitter was full of people going, ‘Oi, Shearer, he’s been playing for my team for three years in FM’.

“So I don’t know whether Graham Carr (head scout at Newcastle United) plays it or not but certainly if he doesn’t he’s probably tapped into our scouting network in France, because of the players they’re picking up. Even the ones we’ve had wrong, they’ve ended up signing, as well as the ones we’ve had right.

“They’ve been rumours about some of the Tottenham deals. I don’t know whether those are true or not but Andre Villas-Boas openly admits that when he was Chelsea’s chief scout working under Mourinho that he used the game as a scouting tool… and why wouldn’t someone?”

Jacobson winces when I ask him about the ‘misses’ - the players who became superstars on Football Manager but were the forgotten men in real life; names like Cherno Samba, Tonton Zola Moukoko and Freddy Adu.

“I enjoy them as someone playing the game. I don’t enjoy them as someone who’s a perfectionist with his work. If we get something wrong, we’ve got it wrong.

“Our strike rate is well over 99%, which is better than most managers around the world. Even Sir Alex Ferguson made mistakes with signings - you know, Kleberson, Djemba Djemba, Bebe - there have been a few over the years.”

So what can we expect of FM 2015? This year’s game allows players to choose the type of boss they want to be - either a ‘tracksuit manager’ who spends their time on the training ground dealing directly with the players, or a ‘tactical manager’, who spends more time concentrating on formations and player recruitment.

The game also benefits from a revamped Match View, which has enjoyed its most significant facelift since the introduction of 3D in Football Manager 2009, including the addition of motion-capture data.

Interaction with the media now goes deeper, with a wider variety of news stories and lines of questioning and a greater focus on building rivalries between managers.

“From a journalistic perspective, the Telegraph's sports section reports about football very differently to The Mirror,” says Jacobson. “Previously in the game we had one generic style of news. Now we don’t. So we’ve gone as far as splitting broadsheet and tabloid away from one another.”

Jacobson has already got the key features in mind for FM 2016 and 2017. And with the development of an online version - a cross between fantasy football and a manager simulation - the future for Sports Interactive is more promising than that of a teenage Argentine wonderkind.

"When we first started, we were a bunch of kids making a game for ourselves. Now we are a bunch of old kids making a game for ourselves," says Jacobson.

"We have a bit of a rule here which is you’re never going to get 100% out of anyone. Ever. No one will ever reach their potential, just because of the way humans are.

"But I insist on 85%. People who talk about giving 150%, it’s bullshit. So we insist on 85% - everything that comes out of here has to be 85%. If everyone in the world gave 85% of their maximum ability, the world would be a hell of a lot better place."

And if my Ipswich team, currently chasing promotion to the Premier League in the year 2021, could match that philosophy, then maybe, just maybe I'll be in the running for the England job.